how fast is the sun moving through space

The Sun is racing through space at hundreds of kilometers per second, depending on what you compare it to.

Quick Scoop

• Around the Milky Way’s center: about 220 kilometers per second (roughly 490,000–500,000 miles per hour).

• Time for one full orbit of the galaxy: roughly 230 million years.

• Relative to nearby stars (local average motion): the Sun has an extra motion of only a few tens of kilometers per second on top of that.

• Relative to the cosmic microwave background (the “rest frame” of the universe): the Sun is part of a larger motion of several hundred kilometers per second.

So if you imagine sitting on the Sun and asking “how fast am I moving through space?”, a typical everyday answer is:

The Sun moves around the Milky Way at about 220 km/s, carrying the whole solar system along on a gigantic, 230‑million‑year galactic orbit.

Even though we feel completely still on Earth, we’re all riding along on that galactic highway at nearly half a million miles per hour. Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.